This is a great review. As someone who lived in a semi- Socialist country (Nicaragua, and also visited yours for a non aligned conference. I gotta say, this was a great review, and a great description of how we grew up in eras and countries where the original project never really took off. One because of corruption ( yours) and another because of Reagan's war (mine) Its hard to explain to someone how it is to grow up in such times and also not somebody who is watching from afar but living it. Thanks brother Charles, you are a great and original writer.

good serious stuff, Charles.....my comment is on the great photo, it looks right out of a David Lynch work,,,

I wonder how much of the hundreds of millions of feet of film the Stasi shot is available? So much could be done with it in the right hands—forgotton movements unearthed (there was a quasi-documentary about the East German skateboard scene few knew existed based on this premise), personal narratives reassembled, etc.

The review is mostly good, but it does make one big mistake. This happens when Mudede speculates that the Stasi might have hated Facebook. This is wrong. They would have loved this and other forms of social media because of the detailed profiles that can be compiled on users. There is no fear, no worry in these digital streams of posts and pictures and personal opinions, making them ideally revealing self-disclosures which can be data-mined and utilized for simple propaganda disbursement (fake news, e.g.) or used for identification of targets for worse things to be perpetrated by the state.

It would be like an East German inviting an agent into their home and giving them cookies and coffee with lots of milk, and chatting and showing them baby pics and photos of a marriage, along with a list of personal contacts, verbatim correspondence, psychosocial interrelationships, political affiliations, vulnerabilities, proclivities, susceptibilities.

Mein Luftkissenfahrzeug ist voller Aale.